Matsushita Electronics Hemispheric Dome

Matsushita Panasonic and Santoku

Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. (MEW) founded in 1935, traces its roots to the company started in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita. MEW operates in the business sectors of lighting products, information equipment and wiring products, home appliances, building products, electronic and plastic materials, and automation control products. MEW was the first large industrial Japanese company to market virtual reality solutions for use in Research and Development.

Today, MEW offers a comprehensive set of immersive systems using hemispherical displays. Their work supports communication infrastructures, promote building renovation, offer products and systems for the convenience of the elderly, raise awarness of environmental protection, etc.

Santoku, Virtools’ partner in Asia, has developed several applications for Matsushita specifically designed to be projected in the new dome. Santoku is moving forward with Matsushita to develop a number of projects, particularly in the field of Virtual Reality.

The Challenge: Powering The Hemisphere

MEW inaugurated its new corporate facility in Shiodome, Tokyo in April 2003 and has been attracting numerous visitors with its Shiodome CyberDome that allows a big audience to experience virtual reality (VR) content simultaneously. The system consists of a number of components including a hemispherical screen of 8.5 meters in inside diameter, 18 liquid crystal projectors, a cluster of 18 personal computers to generate rendering images for respective projectors and a personal computer to control image synchronization. With a bright, high-resolution life-size stereo image projected on the screen having a wide field of view (FOV) of 180 degrees in horizontal and 150 degrees in vertical directions, the audience can experience total immersion of the virtual environment. In addition to its use as MEW's veritable technological showroom, Matsushita also intends for the space to be used as a recreational space open to the public.

Matsushita chose Virtools Dev and Virtools VR Pack – Development Edition as the authoring environment to produce interactive content that is to be projected onto the sceens. The Virtools VR Pack – Publishing Edition is used to deploy the applications created by Santoku, Virtools partner and integrator in Japan. One of the core applications of this CyberDome is the "VR Environmental Project Support Tool," which is used for reviewing and consensus-building on civil engineering and urban developmental projects by construction companies, civil engineers, planners, designers, residents and users. Virtools technology was MEW's obvious choice for the rendering software of CyberDome.


Solution: Virtools VR Pack for User-friendly, cluster-based VR Applications

Until now, other hemispheric devices developed by Matsushita were SGI ONYX based, and the software used for developing content was a proprietary Java- and VRML-based library. By turning to Virtools Dev and the Virtools VR Pack to develop impressive content for their hemispheric dome, Matsushita made the decision that bodes well for future projects using Virtools solutions to create other Matsushita immersive displays. Creative teams producing interactive content have greater flexibility to easily implement their content on any immersive device, thanks to Virtools Dev and the Virtools VR Pack.

With the Virtools solution, Matsushita put a well-honed toolset at the fingertips of its developers and designers, enabling them to create and deploy interactive 3D content on CD-Rom, on the Internet, or for public display via immersive virtual reality environments.

Key Benefits

With Virtools Dev, Matsushita and Santoku found true efficiency for programming.